Many applications have been identified for nanostructures. In many of these applications, such as polymer reinforcements, electrodes for batteries and fuel cells, electron-emitters, gas filters, etc., the arrangement of the nanostructures can be a random or nearly random collection of hundreds, thousands, or millions of nanostructures. Some of the fabrication methods for nanostructures are well suited for fabricating the structures in such random positions and orientations. Some applications can use individual nanostructures that can be manipulated into particular configurations by using microscopic manipulation tools such as MEMS tweezers, laser light tweezers, etc. However, many other applications require orderly arrangements of nanostructures in arrays, which is not always easy to achieve.